Simon Called Peter

Simon Called Peter is a novel that surfaces in The Great Gatsby as a physical object within the secret apartment that Tom Buchanan maintains for his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, in New York City. Its appearance there, and the brief but telling attention Nick Carraway gives it, marks it as a small but significant detail in the novel's depiction of the affair's setting and the cultural texture of the Jazz Age. The book functions as a marker of the apartment's character—a space of borrowed luxury and borrowed tastes—and as a subtle commentary on the social pretensions and moral confusions of the people who inhabit it.

The Book in Myrtle's Apartment

The novel is first mentioned during the chaotic afternoon gathering at the apartment Tom keeps for Myrtle, located on the top floor of a building on 158th Street. Nick, who has been drawn into the affair against his better judgment, notices the book among the apartment's furnishings. The living room is crowded with oversized tapestried furniture depicting ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles, and the only picture is an over-enlarged photograph that resolves, from a distance, into a bonneted stout old lady. On the table, alongside several old copies of Town Tattle and some small scandal magazines of Broadway, lies a copy of Simon Called Peter. The book's placement among these items—scandal sheets and popular magazines—situates it as part of the apartment's deliberately cultivated but ultimately hollow atmosphere of sophistication.

Nick's Attempt to Read It

Later in the same afternoon, after Tom and Myrtle have disappeared for a time, Nick sits down in the living room and attempts to read a chapter of Simon Called Peter. His experience is distinctly negative: he finds that either the book is terrible stuff or the whiskey he has consumed has distorted his perception, because it does not make any sense to him. This moment is one of Nick's few direct engagements with the cultural artifacts of the affair's world, and his failure to find meaning in the book mirrors his broader discomfort and disorientation within the apartment. The book, like the whiskey and the chaotic conversation, contributes to the hazy, dim quality of the afternoon that Nick later describes as one of only two times in his life he has been drunk.

Significance in the Novel's World

The presence of Simon Called Peter in Myrtle's apartment, rather than any of its actual contents, is what gives the book its significance in The Great Gatsby. It is part of the carefully assembled but ultimately unconvincing stage set of the affair—a world of rented rooms, purchased dogs, and borrowed manners. The book's failure to engage Nick, and its placement among scandal magazines, suggests the superficiality of the cultural aspirations of the people in this world. It stands in contrast to the more earnest, if misguided, intellectual pretensions of Tom Buchanan, who reads books like The Rise of the Colored Empires, and to the genuine, if romanticized, literary ambitions that Nick himself once harbored. In this way, Simon Called Peter becomes a small emblem of the moral and cultural emptiness that Nick perceives in the affair and, by extension, in the careless world of the wealthy that the novel critiques.